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Most job candidates know to dress nicely for Zoom interviews and to arrange a professional-looking background for the camera. But a new Yale study suggests they also ought to test the quality of their microphones.

A tinny voice caused by a cheap mic, researchers say, could sink their chances.

Through a series of experiments, the study demonstrates that tinny speech—a thin, metallic sound—during video conferences can have surprisingly deep social consequences, leading listeners to lower their judgments of a speaker’s intelligence, credibility, and romantic desirability. It can also hurt an individual’s chances of landing a job.

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University of Melbourne hydrology professor Dongryeol Ryu and his collaborator Ki-Weon Seo were on a train to visit Ryu’s family when they found something startling. Stopped at a station for technical issues, Seo had pulled out his computer to pass the time with some work when a result popped up in their data that Ryu could hardly believe: It suggested a “remarkable” amount of Earth’s water stored on land had been depleted.

“At first we thought, ‘That’s an error in the model,’” Ryu said.

After a year of checking, they determined it wasn’t.

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Researchers from the Institute of Solid State Physics, the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Southwest Jiaotong University, have combined high-pressure electrical transport experiments, high-pressure Raman spectroscopy, and first-principles calculations to reveal the structural phase transition behavior of hafnium oxide (HfO2) under high pressure and its evolution mechanism in electrical properties.

The paper is published in the journal Physical Review B.

“This study resolves the previous controversies regarding the phase transitions of HfO2 in the low-pressure region,” said Pan Xiaomei, a member of the team.

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Until now, creating quantum superpositions of ultra-cold atoms has been a real headache, too slow to be realistic in the laboratory. Researchers at the University of Liège have now developed an innovative new approach combining geometry and “quantum control,” which drastically speeds up the process, paving the way for practical applications in quantum technologies.

The paper is published in the journal Physical Review A.

Imagine being in a supermarket with a cart filled to the brim. The challenge: get to the checkout before the others, without dropping your products on the corners. The solution? Choose a route with as few corners as possible to go faster without slowing down. That’s exactly what Simon Dengis, a doctoral student at the University of Liège, has managed to do, but in the world of quantum physics.

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The effects of quantum mechanics—the laws of physics that apply at exceedingly small scales—are extremely sensitive to disturbances. This is why quantum computers must be held at temperatures colder than outer space, and only very, very small objects, such as atoms and molecules, generally display quantum properties.

By quantum standards, are quite hostile environments: they’re warm and chaotic, and even their fundamental components—such as cells—are considered very large.

But a group of theoretical and experimental researchers has discovered a distinctly quantum effect in biology that survives these difficult conditions and may also present a way for the brain to protect itself from like Alzheimer’s.

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Lei Xia et al. report on a B7H3-targeting radiotracer for PET imaging of various malignant tumors and for non-invasive screening of B7H3 expression:

The figure shows dynamic PET imaging of selected organs using the radiolabled 68Ga-B7H3-BCH probe.

1Key laboratory of Carcinogenesis and Translational Research (Ministry of Education), Beijing Key Laboratory of Research, Investigation and Evaluation of Radiopharmaceuticals, NMPA Key Laboratory for Research and Evaluation of Radiopharmaceuticals (National Medical Products Administration), Department of Nuclear Medicine, Peking University Cancer Hospital and Institute, Beijing, China and.

2Key Laboratory of Carcinogenesis and Translational Research (Ministry of Education, Beijing), Department of Pathology, Peking University Cancer Hospital and Institute, Beijing, China.

3Department of Nuclear Medicine, Affiliated Hospital of Zunyi Medical University, Zunyi, Guizhou, China.

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